The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams

Chapter Fifteen

The Place Of Friendship

Anthony opened the door of the flat and went quickly into it. He called out as he did so, not that
he had much hope of an answer, even if Quentin were there. But instinctively his voice went before him, desiring to cry
out to that wilderness of spirit, to proclaim the making straight of the highway of God. No other replied.

He went into each room, and even looked behind chairs and inside a deep cupboard or two and under tables and beds.
The agonized fugitive might so easily have tried to hide himself in such an absurd refuge. But he had not; after a very
few minutes Anthony was compelled to admit that the flat was untenanted. He came back into their common lounge and sat
down. Quentin wasn’t here; then he was still in flight — or helpless, or dead. The first possibility of the two which
had been in Anthony’s mind — that of finding his friend — had proved useless; the second and less defined — the hinted
discovery in this house of friendship of a means of being of use to the troubled world — remained. He lay back in his
chair and let his eyes wander round the room.

The traces of their common occupation lay before him, rather tidier at this hour of the morning than they generally
were, because the woman who looked after the flat had obviously only just “been round it” and gone. She had been broken
of her original habit of putting everything straight, of thrusting papers away in drawers and pushing books back on to
shelves — any book on any shelf, so that Spinoza and Mr. T. S. Eliot might jostle, which would have been quite
suitable, but then also Milton might neighbour a study in Minoan origins, which was merely inconvenient, or Mr. Gerard
Hopkins shoulder Mr. Gilbert Frankau, which was silly. So books and papers — and even pipes — still lay on tables, and
Quentin’s fountain-pen upon a pile of letter-paper. There were the pictures, most of them signs of some memory — this
of a common holiday, that of a common friend, that again of a birthday or even of a prolonged argument. A little
reproduction of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen was the sign of the last. Anthony had forgotten for the moment
what the terrific discussion had really been about, though he knew in general terms that it was on the nature of art
and had arisen out of a review of his own in The Two Camps. But he remembered how Quentin had won a perfectly
devastating triumph, and how the next day he had himself searched several picture shops to find the Landseer and had
triumphantly presented it to Quentin that evening as a commemoration of the battle and in illustration of the other’s
principles. Or so he swore it was, though Quentin had rampantly denied it; but they had hung the thing up in mutual
laughter, derision, and joy. Anthony’s eyes left it reluctantly, and went on glancing round the room.

The moments of their past showed themselves multitudinously to him as he looked. In that chair Quentin had sat
sprawled on a winter evening, while he himself, pacing up and down the warm unlit room, had delivered a long monologue
on Damaris; in yonder corner he had himself crouched with books scattered round him while they disputed which
“chorus-ending from Euripides” might conceivably have been in Browning’s mind. Quentin had a fantastic passion for
discovering impossible suitabilities. By the window they had both leaned one evening, while they talked of the exact
kind of authority which reposed in moments of exalted experience and how far they each sought to obey it. In another
chair they had once seated an uneasy canvasser before a general election, and plied him with questions and epigrams
about the nature of the State, and whether a dictatorship was consistent with the English political genius. By the
table they had once nearly quarrelled; near the fireplace they had read immortal verse from a new illustrated edition
of Macbeth which had come to Anthony for review, and had been propped up on the mantelpiece for admiration.
Light and amusing, poignant and awful, the different hours of friendship came to him, each full of that suggestion of
significance which hours of the kind mysteriously hold — a suggestion which demands definitely either to be accepted as
truth or rejected as illusion. Anthony had long since determined on which side his own choice lay; he had accepted
those exchanges, so far as mortal frailty could, as being of the nature of final and eternal being. Though they did not
last, their importance did; though any friendship might be shattered, no strife and no separation could deny the truth
within it: all immortality could but more clearly reveal what in those moments had been.

More certainly than ever he now believed. He reaccepted what they offered; he reaccepted them, knowing from
of old that this, which seems so simple, is one of the hardest tasks laid before mankind. Hard, for the reality is so
evasive; self-consciousness, egotism, heaviness, solemnity, carelessness, even an over-personal fondness, continually
miss it. He could do nothing but indicate to that fleeting truth his willingness to be at its service. It accepted him
in turn; it renewed within him its work of illumination. He felt how some moving power bore Quentin and himself within
it, and so bearing them passed onward through time. Or perhaps it was Time; in that they were related, and
outside that there was only . . . whatever “the perfect and simultaneous possession of everlasting life”
might be. The phrase, he remembered, came from St. Thomas; perhaps Damaris would once have quoted it in a footnote.

He sat on, from recollection passing to reflection, from reflection to obedience, from obedience into a trance of
attention. As he had dreamed, if it were a dream, that he rose on powerful wings through the air of the spiritual
abyss, so now he felt again the power between Quentin and himself active in its own place. Within that power the
presence of his friend grew more defined to him, and the room in which he sat was but the visible extension of an
immortal state. He loved; yet not he, but Love living in him. Quentin was surely there, in the room, leaning by the
window as he had so often leaned, and Anthony instinctively rose and went across, as he had so often gone across, to
join him. If, when he reached it, there was no mortal form, there was yet a reception of him into something that had
been and still was; his movement freed it to make a movement of its own. He stood and looked out of the window upon the
world.

It presented itself to him in an apparition of strength. How firmly the houses were set within the ground! With what
decision each row of bricks lay level upon the row beneath! Spires and towers and chimneys thrust into the sky, and
slender as they were, it was an energetic slenderness. The trees were drawing up strength and displaying it, and the
sunlight communicated strength. The noises that came to him from the streets resolved themselves into a litany of
energy. Matter was directed by and inspired with this first and necessary virtue, and through the vast spaces of the
sky potential energy expanded in an azure wonder.

But the sounds that came to him, though they reached him as a choric hymn, sounding almost like the subdued and
harmonious thunder of the lion’s roar, were yet many. A subtlety of music held them together, and the strength whose
epiphany was before him was also subtilized into its complex existence. Neither virtue could exist without the other:
the slender spires were a token of that unison. What intelligence, what cunning, what practice, had gone to build them!
Even the chimneys — ways for smoke, improvements on the mere holes by which the accidents of fire dispersed — and fire
itself, all signs of man’s invention! He, as he stood there, was an incredibly subtle creation, nerves, sinews, bones,
muscle, skin and flesh, heart and a thousand organs and vessels. They were his strength, yet his strength parcelled and
ordered according to many curious divisions, even as by a similar process of infinite change the few clouds that
floated in the sky were transmuted from and into rivers and seas. The seas, the world itself, was a mass of subtle
life, existing only by means of those two vast Principles — and the stars beyond the world. For through space the
serpentine imagination coiled and uncoiled in a myriad shapes, at each moment so and not otherwise, and the next moment
entirely different and yet so and not otherwise again.

The Lion and the Serpent — but what arose between them, the first visitant from the world of abstract knowledge, the
blue of the sky, the red of the bricks, the slenderness of the spires? “The world was created by number,” someone had
said — Pythagoras, of course. Dear Damaris! But when Number came to man, it was shown, not merely in pure intellectual
proportions, which were no doubt more like its own august nature — No, they weren’t; why were mathematics more after
its nature than butterflies? Beauty went with strength and subtlety, and made haste to emotion as to mind, to sense as
to spirit. One and indivisible, those three mighty Splendours yet offered themselves each to other — and had a fourth
property also, and that was speed.

He stood there, looking out, and as if from some point high in space he beheld the world turning on its axis and at
the same time rushing forward. So also he looked on created things and saw them moving rapidly upon their own concerns
yet also moving forward in a unity. Within the sunlight he could almost have believed that a herd of wild horses came
charging towards him across “the savannahs of the blue,” only they were not a herd and not coming towards him; they
were single and going from him, or would have been had he not been following at a similar speed. And now the trance
deepened upon him, and what had before been half deliberate thought was now dream or vision — and, as if for the last
time, he felt the choice offered him once more. Moments of love were either reality or illusion; the instant knowledge
required his similar decision. He made it at once, and the sunlight grew brighter still and flowed through and around
him. Quentin was leaning on the other side of the window, or whatever opening it was, in whatever world, through which
the light poured, and more than light. For the light changed as he remembered again that it was not Quentin but the
thing that was between him and Quentin, the thing that went with speed, and yet, speeding, was already at its goal, the
thing that was for ever new and for ever old —tam antiqua, tam nova, that issued from its own ardent nest in
its own perpetually renovated beauty, a rosy glow, a living body, the wonder of earthly love. The movement of the Eagle
was the measure of truth, but the birth of some other being was the life of truth, some other royal creature that rose
from fire and plunged into fire, momently consumed, momently reborn. Such was the inmost life of the universe,
infinitely destroyed, infinitely recreated, breaking from its continual death into continual life, instinct with
strength and subtlety and beauty and speed. But the blazing Phoenix lived and swept again to its nest of fire, and as
it sank all those other Virtues went with it, themselves still, yet changed. The outer was with the inner; the inner
with the outer. All of them rose in the Phoenix and a pattern of stars shone round its head, for the interfused Virtues
made a pattern of worlds and stayed, and all the worlds lived and brought forth living creatures to cry out one moment
for joy and then be swallowed in the Return. Ephemera of eternity, they broke into being, and Quentin who stood
opposite him was one of them, and Damaris was another, and the song of joy filled them and swept them down as it pulsed
for sheer gladness into silence again. But the red glow was changing; a soft white light was substituting itself, in
the midst of which there grew the form of a Lamb. It stood quietly, and by it he saw Quentin lying on the ground and
Damaris leaning over him. They were in some open place, and around them in circling haste went the Lion, and circling
within its path, but in the opposite direction, leapt the Lamb. He saw the concentric and complementary paths only for
a moment, for his attention rested on a point between Damaris and Quentin, a point that was speeding infinitely away
from them, so that his own gaze passed between, and they were on each side of him, and then they were not. The point
hung in remote space.

It hung, and after many centuries it opened out, floating nearer, and within it was the earth itself. That which had
been but a point resolved itself into a web of speeding and interwoven colours of so many tones that he could but
recognize one here and there. He saw a golden Lion against that background, and again a Butterfly of sprinkled azure,
and a crimson Phoenix and a white Lamb, and others which he could not know, so swift were the transmutations. But
always the earth — already he could distinguish it, with masses of piling waters heaped back from the dry land between
— was in the very forefront of whatever creature showed itself. Presently it hid them altogether, hid even the web of
colour, though very dimly within it he could still see the pulsations of the glories. They were not to be denied; they
thrust out from it; darkened and in strange shapes. If he had been among them — some million-year-old memory woke in
his brain —when he had been among them, with undeveloped brain and hardly lit spirit, they had gone about him
as terrifying enemies — the pterodactyl and the dinosaur, Behemoth and Leviathan. It was not until man began to know
them by the spiritual intellect that they were minimized to his outer sight; it was to those who were in process of
degrading intellect and spirit that, mentally or actually, they appeared again, in those old, huge, and violent shapes.
When the holy imagination could behold them in forms yet nearer their true selves, even the present animal appearances
would disappear; the Angelicals would be known as Angelicals, and in the idea of Man all ideas would be at one: then
man would know himself. For then the Lion would not be without the Lamb. It was the Lamb of which he was again aware,
aware vaguely of Damaris and Quentin somewhere at hand. His thought returned to his friend. Was Quentin to be exposed
already to the full blast of those energies? What were Damaris and he doing but trying to redeem him from them? Nay,
what else had he been trying to do for Damaris herself? Some dispensation of the Mercy had used him for that purpose,
to moderate, by the assumption of his natural mind into living knowledge, the danger that threatened his lover and his
friend.

His friend. The many moments of joy and deep content which their room had held had in them something of the nature
of holy innocence. There had been something in them which was imparted, by Love to love, and which had willed to save
them now. Much was possible to a man in solitude; perhaps the final transmutations and achievements in the zones on the
yonder side of the central Knowledge were possible only to the spirit in solitude. But some things were possible only
to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need
another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly. Only in such a
balance could humility be found, humility which was a lucid speed to welcome lucidity whenever and wherever it
presented itself. How much he owed to Quentin! How much — not pride but delight urged the admission — Quentin owed to
him! Balance — and movement in balance, as an eagle sails up on the wind — this was the truth of life, and beauty in
life.

But if so — and unconsciously he turned now from the window and wandered back through that place of friendship to
the chair he most commonly used — if so, what of the world of men under this visitation? He thought first of Damaris’s
father, but also of the struggle in Dora Wilmot’s house. One was in some sense beautiful — the other had been horrible;
but even that first entire submission and absorption, was it quite the perfect end? This abandonment, awe-inspiring as
it had been, surely lacked something; would the great classic poets have desired it for a conclusion? If man was
perfectly to know. . . . And if Mr. Tighe had subordinated himself to one Idea, were not those others in
process of being subordinated, each by an Idea to itself? And for others still, what awaited them but thunder,
earthquake, terror, chaos — the destruction of patterns and the blasting of purposes?

Unthinkingly he put out his hand to the cigarette box which Quentin had given him one Christmas; given both of them,
as he had himself pointed out, in remarking on the superior nature of his own present, which had been a neat kind of
pocket-book and therefore an entirely personal gift. But Quentin had maintained that the cigarette box, as being of
greater good to a greater number, had been nearer to the ideal perfection of giving. “For,” he had argued, “to give to
you a means by which you can give to others, is better than to give a merely private thing.”

“But,” Anthony had persisted, “in so far as you are one of those others — and likely to be the most persistent — you
give to yourself and therefore altogether deprive the act of the principle of giving”; to which Quentin had retorted
that he was included only as one of a number, and that the wise man would not deprive others of good because he himself
might be a gainer. “Otherwise what about all martyrs, missionaries, and philanthropists?” And so the comedy had been
played to its end.

The comedy — but this was no comedy; the fierceness of the Lion was no comedy, nor any of those other apparitions,
unless the Lamb . . . The Lion and the Lamb — and a little child shall lead them. Lead them where? Even a
little child was in its own mind presumably leading them somewhere. Or perhaps not, perhaps a little child would be
content just to lead. The Lion and the Lamb — if this were the restored balance?

Friendship — love — had something in it at once strong and innocent, leonine and lamblike. By friendship, by love,
these great Virtues became delicately known. Apart from such love and friendship they were merely destructive and
helpless; man was never meant to be subjected to them, unless by the offering up of his being to “divine Philosophy.”
In that very chair he had been mocked by Foster for hoping to rule the principles of creation, and he had answered that
he had promised to do everything to help Damaris. How far such a profound intention sufficed to rule those
principles he did not know — more perhaps than man normally thought. The balance in things — the Lion and the Lamb, the
Serpent and the Phoenix, the Horse and the Unicorn: ideas as they were visualized and imagined — if these could be led
. . . if . . .

He could not clearly understand what suggestion was being made to him. But an intense apprehension of the danger in
which many besides Quentin were grew within him, a danger brought about by the disorder which had been introduced. He
could not honestly say that in any sense he loved these others, unless indeed love were partly a process of willing
good to them. That he was determined to do, and perhaps this willing of good meant restoration. By order man ascended;
what was it that St. Francis had written? “Set Love in order, thou that lovest Me.” First for Quentin and then for all
the rest.

So gradually abandoning himself to the purpose of the great Power that lived in him, he sat on. If the Eagle was to
be served the Eagle must show him how to serve. In this place of friendship, among the expositions and symbols of
friendship, he was filled with the intention of friendship. Quentin was not here, but here they had been received by
the knowledge of good, by comparison with which only could evil be known. Friendship was one, but friends were many;
the idea was one, but its epiphanies many. One winged creature — but many, many flights of birds. The sparrows in the
garden outside his window — and the brown thrushes that sought in it sometimes — the blackbird and the starling — the
pigeons of the Guildhall and the gulls of the Thames — the pelicans of St. James and the ridiculous penguins of the Zoo
— herons in shallow waters — owls screaming by night — nightingales, skylarks, robin redbreasts — a kingfisher out
beyond Maidenhead — doves and crows? ravens — the hooded falcons of pageantry — pheasants — peacocks magnificently
scornful — migrating swallows of October? migrating? migrating — birds of paradise — parrots shrieking in the jungles
of India — vultures tearing the bodies in the sands of Africa — flight after flight went by. He knew them in the
spiritual intellect, and beheld by their fashioned material bodies the mercy which hid in matter the else overwhelming
ardours; man was not yet capable of naked vision. The breach between mankind and the angelicals must be closed again;
“a little child should lead them”— back. The lion should lie down with the lamb. Separately they had issued — strength
divorced from innocence, fierceness from joy. They must go back together; somehow they must be called. Adam, long since
— so the fable ran — standing in Eden had named the Celestials which were brought into existence before him. Their
names — how should Anthony Durrant know their names, or by what title to summon again the lion and the serpent? Yet
even in Anthony Durrant the nature of Adam lived. In Adam there had been perfect balance, perfect proportion: in
Anthony —?

He was lying back, very still, in his chair. His desire went inwards, through a universe of peace, and hovered, as
if on aquiline pinions, over the moment when man knew and named the powers of which he was made. Vast landscapes opened
beneath him; laughter rang up towards him. Among the forests he saw a great glade, and in the glade wandered a solitary
lamb. It was alone — for a moment or for many years; and then from the trees there came forth a human figure and stood
also in the sun. With its appearance a mighty movement everywhere began. A morning of Light was on the earth; the
hippopotamus lumbered from the river, the boar charged from the forest, the great apes swung down to the ground before
a figure of strength and beauty, the young and glorious archetype of humanity. A voice, crying out in song, went
through the air of Eden — a voice that swept up as the eagle, and with every call renewed its youth. All music was the
scattered echo of that voice; all poetry was the approach of the fallen understanding to that unfallen meaning. All
things were named — all but man himself, then the sleep fell upon the Adam, and in that first sleep he strove to utter
his name, and as he strove he was divided and woke to find humanity doubled. The name of mankind was in neither voice
but in both; the knowledge of the name and its utterance was in the perpetual interchange of love. Whoever denied that
austere godhead, wherever and however it appeared — its presence, its austerity, its divinity — refused the name of
man.

The echo of that high spiritual mastery sounded through the inmost being of the child of Adam who lay tranced and
attentive. His memory could not bear the task of holding the sounds, but it was not memory’s business. The great affair
of the naming was present within him, eternal, now as much as then, and at any future hour as much as now. There
floated from that singing rapture of man’s knowledge of man a last note which rose through his whole being, and as it
came brought with it a cloud. “A mist went up and covered the face of the earth.” His faculties relaxed; his attention
was gently released. He blinked once or twice, moved, saw, recognized, and drowsily smiled at the Landseer; then his
head dropped down, and he was received, until his energies were renewed, into such a sleep as possessed our father when
he awaited the discovery of himself.